


Redefine Divinity

by holyfant



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2008-03-28
Updated: 2012-10-11
Packaged: 2017-11-16 01:16:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 37
Words: 20,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/533877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/holyfant/pseuds/holyfant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of unconnected drabbles and ficlets, all written for my 100moods table on LJ for all of the characters in Greek Mythology. Warnings, ratings etc. are added to chapters individually.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Shoulders (Atlas, G)

**Shoulders**

The only thought he still has is _a way to stop the itch_. It ends there; there is no way to stop the itch. It’s not _a way to stop the itch might be_ or _I know a way to stop the itch_. He doesn’t know a way to stop the itch, he only knows the word _itch i t c h_. The letters bound about inside his skull.

The only feeling he still has is **the itch**. It ends there; there is no action that could change his mood, no consequence of the itch. The itch doesn’t travel, it’s settled at that one horrible, horrible point between his shoulder blades where all his nerves have bundled. His muscles are strained between his shoulders – it’s where all the weight is – and now there is that itch, that scorching hot searing **itch**. It’s everything he still knows. The pain in his shoulders has gone, has been gone for millennia (he’s not even sure he still has shoulders: maybe they slid off his body and the earth is keeping itself up?) but **the itch** stays.

Between his shoulders rivers flow. The hot sands of the desert press down on his body (it’s the cause of the itch, but he doesn’t know this). People kiss and kick. Babies die. Women bless themselves with oil and perfume. Men clap each other on the shoulder, pulling the boats out to sea. Faces clouded in incense predict the future. Between his shoulders, people try to reach the itches between their shoulder blades in that horrible spot you can’t reach. Their husbands, their wives and sisters and parents laugh at them, and scratch for them. They frown because of the ridicule, shrug their itch-free shoulders and continue what they were doing. The people of the desert wash themselves with the sand that’s hurting him. The sun, smiling down on all of them. Except one.

Atlas.

His itch.


	2. Impossible (Ares/Aphrodite, PG-13)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Opposites really do attract.

** Impossible **   


He can't help but think sometimes: they are the perfect pair.

It’s how they hold themselves, it’s what they represent, it’s how they are: opposites in every way, equal in their differences. Their conversations have the tendency to fall short – because they’re too different, because they attract each other too much. He can only give her twenty words before his pulse quickens and he just has to have her, fuck her until they are too spent to speak. She’s too much/not enough, he can’t choose. He only knows that the sight of her makes his blood boil and his loins burn.

It is about sex, but further at the base of it is power. By birth they are placed at opposite ends of the world and they are driven by a desire to destroy what is different. It’s insane; he worships her and her ways strange to him, yet he wants to see her conform. She longs for the same, wishes he would be like her while attracted to his otherness.

She: with her body like the sun and her hair like ripe grain, spends her day in wispy clothing amongst flowers and sex. Sex goes with her, her treacherous worldly companion. She’s abundance, richness – the coming of spring, the shining seed, the orgasm.

He: with his only companion the disloyalty of passion, of impulse, prefers any battlefield over the bed of any woman. He goes to bed with nothing but war on him and he can’t orgasm if he hasn’t made her bleed in some way. He’s inconsistency, flightiness – the knife, the kiss lined with teeth, the empty bed.

Do they love each other?

They meet by accident; the day is young and the flowers fresh.

“Don’t you have some war to fight?” she says as way of greeting. Her body is open, accepting, waiting for the warmth of an early sun.

“Always,” he answers gruffly, feeling on edge (it’s what she does to him). Already her sun-crowned form makes him sweat. “Some wars are about spears, some are about flesh.”

“Must you be such a man, Ares?”

“Would you prefer me to be a woman, then?” He knows the answer is no, despite Aphrodite’s broad sexual interests. He knows she enjoys a woman’s softness, caring, tenderness; he also knows she still craves, needs his roughness helplessly. It’s about the difference. It’s about power.

“Sometimes, yes.”

“Not when I do this.” He steps up to her and bites her neck, drawing blood, pressing his already painfully hard cock against her stomach.

She smiles without showing her teeth and shrugs her fine robe of silk off her shoulders. The sun is rivalled by the splendour of her body and Ares has to bite down on his tongue.

They don’t even take the time to lie down. It’s frantic, it’s fast (it always is): she with her long, willowy legs clamped firmly around his hips, he thrusting into her cunt that was already wet and waiting. She scratches his back roughly and whines when he yanks at her hair. He’s supporting her with one hand, kneading her breast with the other – and she’s warm, and she’s smooth and she comes easily. When she comes, she shudders and says nothing but “Man”, but it’s more than enough for him. Groaning, he thrusts upward one last time and spills himself inside of her. “Be mine,” he sighs (although he means “be me”).

“I am yours,” she says (and she doesn’t mean “I am you”). They kiss – slowly this time, without hurry.

Do they love each other? Yes, with the endless passion of impossible things.


	3. A Helping Hand (Andromache/Helen, NC-17)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Open the floodgates.

** A Helping Hand **

It was impossible not to want the fairest of all, so gifted by the golden Aphrodite. For Andromache, it was also impossible to like her. Helen the fair-haired from Argos was filled with self-pity and from her shapely lips fell only complaints and wishes to die. While Andromache envied the slim ankles and the tantalising shoulders in the simplest yet most elegant peploi, she also rather wanted to hit her sister-in-law over the divinely beautiful head with an amfora most of the time. Helen had driven Paris to desperate passion and despair and looking around she saw all around Helen fall the same way Paris had, even the most trusty of her own servants leaving her unfinished peplos in its stand to weave for Helen. All the while, Helen cried and clung to Paris like dew does to a blade of grass when Eos rises. Andromache the white-armed disliked people who refused to acknowledge their actions. Helen had come here, the furious sons of Atreus at her heels, and she had to face responsibility as far as Andromache was concerned.

Because of the fact that when the two women met, Andromache experienced a mix of turbulent lust and stormy dislike, she avoided to cross the Greek woman’s path and stayed out of the communal women’s rooms when she knew Helen would be there, seducing everyone silently with her mere presence.

That was before, though. And things had changed. Helen was here now – had interrupted her haze of numb grief that hung over her like a bride’s veil. The bride to a corpse.

Hector was dead and Andromache could not find the strength to greet Helen, let alone send her away.

“O Andromache,” breathed Helen, her beautiful face the most turbulent of seas. She rustled over to the bed on which Andromache lay spent and naked, having torn her clothes from her limbs in the furious rage she had felt upon seeing the swift-footed Achilles kill the last family she had left. He had orphaned her all by himself. What of Skamandrios now? The boy had no father and a ghost as a mother. She wanted Helen to leave but could not form the words.

Helen was speaking, a string of soft soothing words like a river flowing out to sea. “You should not be alone right now, sister,” she murmured and appeared to be untying her peplos, “you should be held and loved.”

Hector was dead and Andromache’s insides turned to ash as she inevitable felt her body react to Helen’s careful lying down of her unclothed body to cover on side of Andromache fully, skin on skin.

“Cry,” Helen said, trailing her white woman’s hand over Andromache’s ribs. Andromache tossed her head from one side of the pillow to the other in a grotesque ‘no’.

“Let me help you then.” Helen’s words were a soft stream of warm air in her hair. She felt the other’s woman’s lips lightly move against her jaw and could not help but arch into Helen’s hand as it softly pressed down on her breast. She had seen this scenario unfurl sometimes, in her dreams or in the highest point of pleasure with Hector inside her, but to have it happen was not right, was wrong was ungodly would kill them – Hector was dead and Achilles’ chariot dragged him over the rough rocks of Ilion. Her beautiful beloved husband torn to shreds, Achilles’ face a mask of anger – “No,” she said to Helen, willing her body to stay still.

Helen placed her long fingers on her jaw, turned her head slowly and kissed her.

“Just let me help you, my sister,” she whispered into Andromache’s mouth, “let me break your dam of grief.”

She sent her hand moving slowly down, following every dip and curve of Andromache’s milk-white body. Andromache let out a breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding and tangled a hand in Helen’s fair hair. She felt her sorrow trample around like a beast in a cage – she was the cage – and Helen’s fingers stirring it to life. “Help me,” she said then like a child.

Helen moved with the swift grace of a cat, swung herself astride the Trojana in one fluid motion. She held still for a moment, touched both her hands to Andromache’s brow and smiled a small smile of reassurement. Then she kissed her, deeply, and slid her hands down Andromache’s face and over the soft mounds of her breast. There she lingered for a moment, cupping the globes of flesh in her hands, lightly touching in a way that made Andromache ache. She trailed her fingers down the pale expanse of belly, then shifted her body down so that her hand had better access to where Andromache was already wet and hurting. Slowly, gently, she eased a finger in, then let it slip back wetly over the sensitive nub that made Andromache’s body shake as if jolted by lightning. Rapid words in her Cilician dialect spilled from Andromache’s lips as her body tensed. Helen repeated her actions relentlessly, went deeper, added a finger and twisted them inside her sister-in-law. Andromache had her eyes shut tight and was talking fast, words the Greek woman didn’t understand save Hector, Hector. Soon Helen’s skilful hands had Andromache trembling, every muscle in her body strung high and taut. Helen circled the other woman’s clit, rubbing hard, and inside Andromache she curled one finger upward to brush a very sensitive spot – and the dams were breaking, Andromache’s body spasmed wildly as she came hard with a soft cry. Her orgasm enveloped her like a sea of coiling pleasure, setting free her stiffly locked grief.

“Yes, like that,” Helen said somewhere close to her face as she began to cry harshly in great shuddering breaths, as she wept like a child. She was unable to do anything as Helen disentangled her long limbs from her own. Through the haze of tears she couldn’t see, but she briefly felt Helen’s lips on her brow before she felt rather than saw the other woman tie her peplos and leave her.

Hector, HectorHectorHectorHector. Andromache cried. 


	4. Sunset (Poseidon/Amphitrite, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maybe he truly is a god of wrath.

** Sunset **

Maybe he is truly a god of wrath.

Maybe he is truly red inside, boiling, small, the pit of the endless blue where it is so hot the water scalds. Maybe he is truly nothing like his domain, maybe he is truly the only reason the water sometimes fights. (Would it fight if he wasn’t here, or would it sigh en lie almost still, with the birds sleeping on top of sweetly tumbling waves?) It is true that he loves it, loves how his body’s boundaries still defy the roar of the waves in the storm and how he can make it stop (with a word, with a thought, sometimes even in dreams). He loves being the only colour amidst black and the confused, turned-grey pallor of the scared fish.

So yes, maybe he truly is a god of wrath and destruction; fickle, without loyalty, with a lust for blood.

But at the end of another day, another another day in the quickly passing eternities of his life, he also loves the sun and how it is red before ending its day’s journey. He loves how the water is full of gold dancing at the diamond surface – the treasures of the world are no less valuable than the treasures of the seas. He loves being dry then, residing over the small waves without touching them – and he loves how his wife’s hair hangs down and the drops of water in her lashes dry slowly. Islands of loveliness in Amphitrite’s eyes where he lays himself to rest.

The sleep of an entire world. He is awake in it and he loves it then, too – his own smallness, blinded by a greater universe of colour.

She, awake now and then but mostly not, whispers to him with closed eyes that he is _exactly_ like his domain, and he kisses her dry mouth.


	5. Descent (Persephone, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She can never get used to the cold.

**Descent**

There is one thing she can never get used to as she descends again, like she's descended an amount of times that is impossible to describe (she feels like she was never even gone, the descent is that familiar). There is one thing she hasn't accepted and it's the cold.

Before the earth closes up above her head, she can glimpse for a second the fullness of the sun waning in the darkening sky. She knows something is happening that she's never seen. Her mother has described it to her, with the strangeness of one who is describing a painting, not a real thing: the leaves on the trees that she so loves are withering fast, scattering reds and browns before dying on a cracked, brittle earth. Hardened water – her mother calls it 'ice', says it is cold and hard and sharp, but at the same time blunt, because it makes your hands lose their strength and their feeling – creeps up from streams and seas and rests in the people's hair as they shiver in their sleep. Rain falls, but is so cold that it flutters down, almost weightless, and is white as old women's hair. It's like a blanket, Demeter says, a blanket of death. Persephone always listens to these tales of winter with a tensing throat. There is a strange fear in what her mother describes, and this makes her afraid in turn, because if her mother cannot control what is going on who can? She only knows rains that make her blood run faster and coax the fields to life. She only knows a sun that blazes fiercely and stands in a proud, bright sky. She only knows sweat.

As she descends, the cold of Dis rises to meet her. Her sun-nourished body recoils from the shock, and as always – even after all this time, an amount of times of descent that she doesn't know how to describe – she needs a moment to gather herself and steel herself against the bite of the Dis emptiness that pushes at her from beneath, coiling upwards against her on the steep path downwards.

Dis doesn't have ice, or snow, as her mother calls the rains of death. The underworld has no switch from light to dark, no change from sun to frosty moon – it is just always frozen, always, always stagnant like a cold, dank pool of water. She feels submerged in a lake of absence – the absence of sound, of colour, of change, of warmth. It is the only way for her to describe Dis as she meets it again after her months on the surface: Dis is the upper world's negative. The cold is an absence of warmth, nothing else. She doesn't know, but she thinks her mother's cold is something else – with this ice, this snow that falls during the night, that makes patterns on lakes and fields and maybe sometimes even a weak sun, as Demeter said, fighting hard against the sinking of the world. Somehow the surface's cold sounds to Persephone as if it at least is dynamic. And even if it is not, it is bound to give way to spring again.

There is no winter in Dis because it is always like this, like moving through a motionless and timeless forest of petrified trees. Memory comes here to die like everyone else.

Persephone thinks of Hades and his love – calm, stagnant like his world, cold to the touch but yet, real. She is here for a reason and she knows he is it. She knows he cannot tell her because he doesn't know the words, but that he has missed her in her months with her mother. She will slip into his embrace; he will not say “I love you” because he always does, constantly, without change, and things that do not change do not need to be said. She will reappear in his existence like she disappears from it, like a flicker of a flame – and he will know the difference even if he does not know what a difference is.

She can never get used to this cold, this forever-still, but she knows why she is here.


	6. Fire and Ice (Medea, PG)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She doesn't tell them where she's taking them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: infanticide

** Fire and Ice **

She doesn't tell them where she's taking them. She doesn't say anything to them at all, no word of reassurance or comfort for her sons. Her sons, into whose eyes she had to learn how to look, because their shining faces of childhood, promise and love burnt her like the sun. After the first was born she hadn't been able to stop crying. Jason had been summoned to calm her and he had been the only one – the _only one_ \- in that palace of servants, slaves, shades and silence who had understood how she felt. He had put a hand – cool, rough – on her forehead and said, slowly, as if he had only just learned how to speak: “It burns like a fire, doesn't it?” And all she could do was nod, press her head into his hand hard. It did burn, this new, unfamiliar love for a thing so ridiculously small and fragile she had feverish thoughts of killing it herself before anything else had the chance. That was when _they_ still had love too, she and Jason, when he had slid into bed with her and held her, rested her head against his beating heart amidst the wetness and the reverberating pain of the birth. She had loved him for knowing even if he would never fully understand what it was like to part with a piece of yourself, a mirror of yourself, a throbbing, living dream made flesh, a wonder that fit into an elbow, an almost-blank canvas that stared at you with your own, still unseeing eyes. Her sons had been treasures that she had carefully held in her hands. Like catching the rays of the sun.

She doesn't tell them where she's taking them. They don't ask. They follow her like they always do; the oldest solemn, serious, already a king in the making, the youngest distracted, jittery. They trust her to lead the way like she always has. And she does. And yet she doesn't. She doesn't tell them where she's taking them, even though she could – a place that will make them forget. The waters of Lethe gently lapping at their feet. A field. Softness, slowness. The water in their eyes would not taste salty. It would taste sweet. It would taste of forever, of nothing. She hopes it's true. She already knows she's not going there.

The flame of her hatred is like a low, slow, steady fire. It makes her cold and warm. It makes her sweat ice. It is the steady rumbling of a volcano in winter. It burns her like her sons do.

The worst is when she kills the youngest, because his face is still full of trust. He doesn't understand what she just did to his brother, who at least had spat in her face in the last final seconds of his life. She deserved that but she does not deserve this trust at all, which makes it so much worse. Yet she kills it. She kills the trust because when she looks into her youngest child's eyes, she sees Jason.

The volcano burns steadily on inside her. She feels cold. She feels old. She cries, silently, with tears that are scalding, that are salty, that taste of never, never, nevermore.


	7. The Mirror Girl (Psyche, PG-13)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Behind mirrors worlds lie. And not all mirrors are visible.

** The Mirror Girl **

Through the plain ran a creek. It was a clear, docile trickle of water that fed into the explosively green edges of the forest beyond the waving grass. The grass that touched her legs like a lover, that always seemed to be saying goodbye. The creek was always murmuring hello.

She’d taken to resting her feet on the wet banks and push down until the mud squished up between her toes. It was the comfort for days of doing nothing and nights of never sleeping: resting her feet like a worn-out labourer she felt as if she was working hard. Around her the grass sang. She often slept until her shoulders were hot to the touch, the colour of blood. Her toes were white underneath their dark brown coats.

She tried to cross the creek once and had a burning wish to try again. But the mud had refused to release her feet, drawing her in like a hungry mouth, and the water had stopped still and turned murky. She couldn’t see herself in its surface anymore and for an endless moment she had a bone-chilling, heart-stopping fear in every fibre of her being that she had disappeared. She stopped and retreated to her bank. The small river murmured its agreement. Its hidden threat. She was so worn out she slept for hours and woke up to find the sun only barely glimpsing over the trees on the other side of the creek.

She never tried to cross it again.

When she was in the house, she felt that the river cut across it as well. She supposed it ran beneath the floor, in cold damp caves of crystal water. The thought made her shiver and draw her veils closer. There were parts of the house she could never reach. The invisible line of the water held her back, sent her hurtling back into the wall whenever she tried, her nerves burning with both pleasure and pain. The inside of the house was dark and cool. In her dreams water ran down the walls.

Her invisible lover came and went with the moon. He rarely spoke, just pressed himself urgently against her hips, and spilled himself on her night gowns before he even entered her. She was fond of him in an absolute, desperate way: she feared him more than anything but when he came to her, she clung to him like a baby to its mother’s breast. He touched her and it made her trust the idea that she existed. She told him about the water. He just kissed her words away and said: “Wind brought you here. Water keeps you here.” When he lay spent she slipped out of bed and felt the desire to kill him in the dark. Even more disconcerting was the want to light every candle in the room and watch his face as he died.

He became so intimately entwined with night-time that soon she was unable to separate the two. Whenever it was dark, she expected him everywhere, covering every inch of her like the earthy darkness. He never did, though – he was a fumbling lover. She would never know how deep that contradiction ran.

During the day, she took a lot of baths. She recognised this was probably born out of her intense fear of the water and the proof that she could handle it, and discarded the thought before it was even properly finished. Around her whispered the invisible servants – breezes that caressed her every curve before they plunged solid hands into the water. What her nightly lover would not give her, these lovers would. It was like making love to Zephyrus – except she knew that these were his daughters, without satiable phalli, but rather with insatiable mouths. They blew their cool breaths and stirred the little hairs on her skin to life. They were untouchable but yet they could touch and they kissed and caressed her again and again and again between her legs until she was lifted off the ground with the force of it and she bucked wildly against the invisible tongues as everything was illuminated in her mind. She came down from her high feeling stupid. It was a lover’s desire to return a favour. Yet she would never be able to.

The seasons that she had so loved at her father’s court did not come. The plain was ablaze with an eternal spring, en endless growing crescendo that wound her up tightly waiting for its conclusion – but it never came. She hated it. She wanted change. She wanted cold to scald her so she could appreciate warmth. She took to wearing impossible heavy clothes and sweated herself empty inside them. The flowers that she pulled out in rage replaced themselves within minutes. Days like this made her so tired she slept through her nightly lover’s visit to wake up in the morning and find her belly covered in his dried semen.

Slowly she was going insane.

One day, sitting silently at the happily trickling creek and feeling hate too big for her body fill her up, she first saw the maiden. The girl was walking with light feet through the trees across the river and she was caught in glimmering fabric. Like a wave. Like a creek. She danced closer, her hair drifting behind her lazily and smiled a smile like the sun. The river turned murky, swirling slowly. The maiden moved her mouth, but no sound came. She smoothly let her wispy garments slide off the milky skin of her shoulders, until she was splendidly naked, radiating light. Her beauty was so immense it was like a shock of ice-cold water to the girl on the other side of the creek, who felt an explosion of heat and want in her lap. Astonished, growing hot, she watched how the other one ran her hands over the planes of her own body, until she reached her divine delta and slid her fingers into it, head thrown back, hair streaming out behind her.

_Go to her_ was the only thought that still existed. Gathering herself, feeling need pulsing through her veins, all thoughts of other lovers forgotten except this one on the other side of the water because oh she was everything that would ever be, Psyche ran without thinking into the river. The other girl did the same.

The world collapsed. The sky fell down. The sun burst into a thousand pieces and the water started pulling, pulling – there was one feeble kiss, separated by worlds of difference, before the water swooped in. Every mirror in the house, outside the house, inside herself burst. Eros’ voice said: “Water keeps you here.”

Her seven years of misfortune. 


	8. Sculptor (Hephaistos, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hephaistos may have been rejected, but they all need him today.

** Sculptor **

He likes to lean over deeply into his work until his tattered hips smart with pain. There’s pleasure in the pain; delving deeply into his carvings, body strangely twisted, Hephaistos feels as though the strength in his legs has been moved to his arms. The pain surging through his legs is nothing but reminder of his skill – rejected, undone, left to die and yet the only one that makes the earth spout fire. His legs are useless but nobody has arms like his. He has redefined divinity.

They all need him today.

He remembers what Zeus had told him before: “Give me a pestilence upon the humans. All-giving, all-seductive, all-destructive.” The mountain’s fire had shimmered in his eyes and Hephaistos had set to work.

The first things that had come to him were her words ( _poisonous plague powerful_ ) and the mouth to put them in ( _slow sensual soft_ ). He saw how she would bring her gift to humankind to her lips in hands wet with dew and men would think she was the gift. He saw how the muscles in her throat would tense as she laughed, carrying around weightless infinite blackness in a beautiful jar.

She’d be her own victim, come to love herself more than anything else the gods had made. She would see herself as reigning queen and unleash everything that broke men in invisible places upon the world.

Limping, the volcano god shuffles around the ever-growing image of all that is beautiful and dies before your eyes. His legs throb with pain but his head is swimming euphorically. He creates her like sculptors would – except he doesn’t love her, and he deforms her by making her beautiful. She’s too beautiful. When she’s staring down at him with eyes that can’t blink yet, he breathes the fire of the mountain into her until something awakens inside her stone form. (She’ll always be _stone_ cold and unrelenting)

“Pandora,” he says unsmilingly.

She can’t speak yet.

Time to call the other gods.


	9. Oresteia (Iphigenia,  Agamemnoon, Klytaimnestra, Orestes, Elektra, PG)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A family tragedy in snapshots.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings: character deaths

** Oresteia **

1\. Iphigenia

For the longest time she insisted to her mother and sisters that she hated the war. Every war but especially this war. Her mother tried to soothe her first, brushing her hair at night while Iphigenia watched her distorted yellow reflection in the bronze. Later Klytaimnestra was angry, pulling at the braids cruelly, snapping at her insolent daughter she should be proud to have a father so valiant and strong, and an uncle so fierce who loved her father so.

But she knew Menelaos did not love her father. He had always hated his brother, and he had always hated his wife, and he had always hated the Trojans, and he had always hated peace. What she hated, she told herself silently at night, massaging her scalp to soothe the pain her mother had inflicted on her, was men who mistook hate for love. Even worse, those who mistook cruelty for honour. Her father was the more valiant of the two, but also the more capable. She hoped he would not forget his family, so far away, in such a different land.

When word arrived that she was to help the Achaians by marrying Achilleus, she felt conflicted. From what she knew of the skilled warrior, he could well be exactly like her uncle; a dumb brute who did not know for what to live and therefore followed an uninspected path carved by tradition.

Yet she went. Because she trusted her father. Her head hurt.

2\. Agamemnoon

When she was a child he had often put his hands on her neck when she was restless. The pressure of his heavy fingers on her pulse made her relax and sleep. She was a thinking child; he often found it slightly improper for a girl, but somehow in spite of himself he liked her seriousness, the way she could come to him late at night and ask him questions that he himself had never before considered. He understood little of her but he knew she was a treasure.

He was a father and a fighter at at last he could no longer prevent the two from meeting. So here he was, with his hands on his daughter's blushing neck again, again, for the last time an act that she had always read as kindness. He had to harden now, conflate his routinely bloodstained killing hands with his secretly tender parenting ones, and push at her pulse point, which was so weak, so easy to break. He had to make her loving words falter to a panicked pleading spitting, watch her radiant eyes turn dark with a deep knowledge of him, of his utter betrayal that could not be washed away by his tears that fell onto her open-mouthed face. The o of her lips that described her shock and, worse, her I knew it. She tore her bridal chiton clawing at his hands, went tense and then with an almost watery sigh went limp, as she had so often before, drifting off to sleep under the same-different hands.

As she burned and the winds picked up, cruelly, softly, like laughter, his confused hands plucked at his body like birds, like they didn't know whose they were anymore.

3\. Klytaimnestra

The house held its breath. The flames in the hearth were stifled and choked into obedient embers that flared up now and then. The gauzes in the doorways didn't flutter, never, not once, almost marble-like with Elektra's equally frozen outline on the other side, curved like a question mark. It was noon but the house was dark. Klytaimnestra felt fear and hatred fighting for a place in her throat, and she was both moved and enraged by the way her stupid, silent daughter managed to make her question a plan years in the making, a plan approved by all laws of men if not by the gods themselves. Just by standing there in the doorway, not uttering a word into the growing stillness of the air around them.

She was still a mother despite the hole left by Iphigenia, which could only be filled by revenge, white-hot and murderous, and she sensed the question mark growing stronger. The growing confusion of her normally so windswept daughter, who liked chitons that bounced as she ran and secretly unbraided her hair to feel it against her cheeks. Who even as a child slept the most soundly in a storm. When Elektra eventually slipped past the lank curtain into the clamminess, the growing darkness around Klytaimnestra, her hair was lank on her head and there was water on her cheeks, although she could not know. Orestes hung to her sweaty hand like a puppet.

When their mother opened her mouth to speak she found she had no air left in her lungs to say anything at all, and she could only wait for the heavy footsteps of her husband returning, which would bring the winds.

4\. Orestes

Sometime he felt like two people. At day, wandering the island that changed every day under his feet and the winds, he felt almost shocked, like the small child he was when he was brought here, bloodstained in a way that would never wash off. Barefoot, with hardened heels and heart, he sought tall rocks and stood on them, stretching his body, young, lean, to the heavens to not feel pliable anymore. To create a body of bronze with a heart of quicksand. At day, sun-baked, he burned for revenge.

At night he felt soft, exposed, blurred at the edges. He sought his sisters' hands to hold in his dreams but found nothing, only a strange stillness, a clammy space. He cried for his mother in his sleep.

It was impossible for him to want to kill his mother by day yet want her to hold him at night. To dispel his growing sense of doubleness he tried to stop sleeping. When sleep did claim him, as sleep like a sneaking thief unchangeably does, his dreams were of his family's bodies smothering him in excessive love; his mother pressing him to her breast like an infant, his sisters tearing out their hair and letting it fall on him like grim feathers. They screamed at their mother. Hot tears falling onto his closed eyelids.

That's when he knew that in his dreams, he was his father's corpse.

And that's when he knew he was ready.

5\. Elektra

There is nothing more bitter than being left alone. Under the trees, which she has always loved, she hates everything, especially how an honourable life is elusive. And how nothing is believed that is true, and how everything of beauty is cut down. The bark cuts into her back. The sky overhead wheels on, indifferent.


	10. Heartbeat (Ariadne/Theseus, PG-13)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She knows the maze by heart.

** Heartbeat **

She knows the maze by heart. She knows its heart.

At night, she can feel it beating – the dark centre, the vortex tugging at the air on the island like a whirlpool. Sometimes she watches it from her window. The maze fills her sight; there is no end to it, the horizon blends in with it, falls into it. As she watches and the hours slip by her, the stars melt from the sky and go out in the deep, dark hole in the middle.

The labyrinth is alive only because it ingests life. There is nothing truly living about it, Ariadne understands – it siphons off the strength of others and uses it up. The electric fire of a maiden's smile, the tension of a young man's shoulders, their love, their dreams, their sweat, their tears; all this keeps the labyrinth alive. Death and life dancing around each other, spinning so quickly on their axis they blend together. Life being drawn in by death, turned back into a life of sorts. The blackness at the heart of the maze is silent and screaming both.

She often goes into the maze the day after the sacrifices have been made. The screams still hang in the air, reverberating, caught in time. The minotaur, a creature she knows is nothing, really, only an avatar of the labyrinth's powers, is sleeping at such times. The labyrinth is always awake, but it is still digesting blood and flesh and most of all, minds, young minds with possibilities in them, unrealised potential – that is what really feeds the maze. She avoids it when it's hungry, but she doesn't think it would hurt her, she doesn't think it could. She knows it. Still, she can never be sure of this. The throbbing night that comes up to meet her is full of traps.

She doesn't really know where to go; she could never draw a map or give anyone directions. But she knows the maze _by heart_ ; it calls to her, gently draws her in, like water calmly running down to collect in the lowest point. Stagnant, quietly powerful and destructive.

She trails her hands over the stone. It's always slick with an unknown wetness – blood, she sometimes thinks, and then, no, it's tears, but no, that's not it either – and though she knows what it is, what it really is ( _the breath of the labyrinth condensed on the coldness of the stones_ ) she can't acknowledge it. She has a strange sort of love for this place, but there is an immense fear, too, and as long as she pretends that the gusts playing with the skirts of her chiton are just lost winds, caught forever in the maze, or that the stickiness at her fingers is just rainwater from eons ago, when the gods still lived, she can be here. If she allows herself to see how the stones shiver with a strange kind of alertness under her touch and yes, that the labyrinth is breathing into her ear, she would quickly become one of its victims. That's the trick, she knows – don't fear it and it will not eat you. She fears it when she's at home, in her bed. When she's here, she loves it.

Still, the corpses always make her cry. Bled like pigs, not a drop of blood left in their bodies; even their eyeballs are dry and shrivelled.

But things can change.

Theseus is everything she thought he would be. She didn't know he was coming but knew something was. Something was going to happen, even the maze knew it as it rumbled and the minotaur ran into walls frantically. A balance had been upset somewhere in the sky. A corrective measure was being taken somewhere.

And then, Theseus: shining. Hard even under his armour. Otherworldly.

He tries to pretend he's here to save the Athenians. She knows he's here to save himself. From what? Then, she thinks: from being forgotten. Later she will think: from being remembered.

She gives him a piece of string and the one crucial piece of advice she could give: don't allow yourself to see what it really is, don't open your eyes to it. He takes both, his hand as a thank-you on her face. She feels her own heart beating for the first time – always so attuned to the beat of the labyrinth, she's surprised to feel her own dark centre picking up speed.

She tracks his descent into the maze, into its madness, into its centre that isn't one, by putting her finger on the thread, which she's fastened to her wrist. It cuts into her. The trembling of the string on her pulse mirrors, she imagines, the dual heartbeats of Theseus' and the maze's, two opposing forces that she loves, that her heart is trying to match. She has a hammering inside herself that she has never known.

He emerges. And if she's honest with herself she must admit that she never expected him to. She's still tied to the spitting, the smoking labyrinth; it's pulling at her string, trying to coax her in. He cuts it off her wrist with an almost gentle slash of his knife and circles the wound the thread has made with his forefinger and thumb. He could break her wrist if he wanted to. Instead, he's a bracelet on her and later, will lick at her blood, saying how he can feel it renewing itself, getting free. She knows it's not getting freer but instead attaching itself to him, letting itself be drawn in by him like it used to be by the maze. She's frightened in the same way that she is in the maze: by not seeing what he is.

She forgets about decorum. She forgets about being a king's daughter. She forgets about herself. (Really, nothing is different and she wonders briefly if his descent into the place out of which no man was supposed to return has turned him into what the maze used to be, if he has taken on its spirit. When she looks into his eyes and feels the alarming sensation of falling forward into them, this doubt is like ice in her mind; but then she remembers: don't see it for what it is – and she kisses him.) She kisses him and allows him to trail his hand up her thigh, smearing her with blood that is hers and not hers. She doesn't just allow him, if she's honest she's the one doing most of it: she's reaching into his trousers where she finds his manhood and fondles it like she used to fondle the stones of the labyrinth. Really, nothing is different, even his breath on her skin is the same, maybe his tongue between her thighs is more tangible, but the pleasure is not more because of it, it is just as fleeting – she grasps at his head, drawing him in, wanting him in her, wanting him to be her. He slips into her soon enough, there's pain, there's pleasure, there's more pain than pleasure but that is how it always was and she crosses her legs behind him, locking him into place inside her, letting him hit a place that is both sweet and bitter, until he cries out against her shoulder, teeth grazing her skin, and she feels the warm rush of him inside of her. She feels cold in one sense and hot in another. His kiss is tender. Hers is more of a bite.

When he leaves her, she's surprised in spite of herself. Her awareness of the darkness at his centre seemed enough to be able to read him. It wasn't; he's leaving. When he tells her she can see in his eyes that it pains him. And that he fears her. He wilts like a leaf before her eyes.

She curses him.

Not for leaving her, really.

For making her see that, in the end, it is she who bears the curse, who has the maze's spirit inside of her. For showing her that he was just an avatar for herself. Like the maze. For forcing her to see herself for what she is.

A skin. A skin containing nothing but emptiness. A boundary that needs to collide with other boundaries to contain anything. With a centre that isn't one, that is full only of nothing, a dark pool where stones make no ripples.

As he hurries off, eyes averted, and she sees the beautiful clouds of the sails receding, she feels her heartbeat slowing down.


	11. Frontier (Orpheus, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The final frontier.

**Frontier**

 

It's almost as if he can feel her warmth behind him. His mind makes her solid again, remembers how she was; always light, fleeting, teasing him as she stepped out of his grasp lightly before succumbing to his hands – and then she was full-bodied, earthy, her heart pounding in every point where he held her. Her lips flushing as he flung his lyre, his other-love, to the side and pressed his musician's hands against the point where her neck disappeared into her gauzy chiton. She was alive then, meeting him halfway in every movement, claiming him as much as he her.  
  
It's like he can feel that again, that heat – her solid love, her youthful confidence in herself and in him and in them. As if she's hovering behind him, only leaving a thin border of Hades air (not-air) between them and her body manages to close the gap between them by sending him her warmth.  
  
His own, spooked, too-alive heart is pounding in his throat. He tries to hang onto the knowledge that he's only imagining things; she's not close by, she's being led by Hermes – and even if she was she wouldn't be warm.  
  
<i>She wouldn't be warm</i>, he tells himself and feels sudden tears gathering in his eyes. She wouldn't be warm.  
  
The road is long and there is no light at the horizon. On both sides the abyss is dark as night. He hears no footsteps behind him, no matter how intently he listens, his apprehension rising with every step. Are they even there? Can he be sure that Hades hasn't tricked him? Goosebumps rise on his skin.  
  
He stops. There is no sound at all. The panic is a cold stone in his stomach. I need to – I need to check if she's there – and his neck makes a jerky movement before he can gather himself. He looks directly into her eyes, which cloud over with an _I knew it, of course I knew it_ , a shadow of disappointment, a subdued flash of anger, as bright as a newly dead shade can manage. As Hermes gently takes her elbow and steers her away, like a lover almost, her reproachful face relaxes into a bland mask of acceptance, of indifference. Of death. She disappears into Hades' night.  
  
The final frontier. His heart is a lump of ice. The final frontier that he was arrogant enough to cross, creeps up to him and pushes against him until he is outside. The border is closed.


	12. Moment (Actaion, Artemis, PG)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One endless, glorious moment.

** Moment **

For one endless, glorious moment, all is silent and he looks at her. Trying to keep his balance by hugging the tree nearest to him, he leans toward the glistening lake where she’s floating in the water. His ears are pounding, not only with the speed of the hunt still present in his limbs, but also with the rush of enamoured blood that explodes inside him.

Artemis’ nymphs, speckled with the sunlight filtering through the trees, laugh with soft, tinkling voices – much like rivers themselves – and they tend to her shining body with their hands. One of them catches water in the cup of her hands and lets it flow out over the goddess’ hair. As if he’s standing in a tunnel with only her magnified image on the other side, Actaeon sees how the drops cling to her lips and run off her cheeks as she smiles. A second nymph takes the place of the first, folding her hands around Artemis’ brow and touching her head in such a way that the goddess closes her eyes and lets out an almost inaudible sound of contentment. Around her the other women wash each other’s hair and adorn it with the small white flowers that float on the surface of the lake. They bathe each other’s shoulders with gentle, slow movements and share soft, intimate smiles in the small space between their faces. Short, fleeting kisses are exchanged between Artemis’ servants; one of the nymphs drags her top lip gently over the wet exposed skin of another’s neck, while yet another rests her hands on her shoulder blades, massaging them.

All this is lost on Actaeon. He stares at the sun that is Artemis’ body in the pool, at her nipples that are lapped against by the movement ripples of the water. Where her servants touch her, she flushes red. Her body is like a shell; open, accepting.

Then, she suddenly looks him straight in the face and all of the relaxation drains out of her body. The moment is lost. She screams as her maidens scramble around her to protect her from his eyes – and she yells and she yells and something’s happening to him and he needs to run away now –

He can hear his hounds barking in the distance.


	13. Mountain (Hephaistos, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Of all the mountains in this beautiful land, he loves Vesuvius the most.

** Mountain **

Hephaistos loves the mountains of Greece and Magna Graeca. They curve away sturdily and silently into a sky that’s hard and blue overhead, like rock soldiers waiting for a general that has the fire to move them. Their lush, green coats are shaken off as easily as they grow back – but the mountains never move, they stay and their faces stay the same even as humans die and gods quarrel. He loves their silent presence that never goes.

He was thrown off Olympos as a child, the rich earth rushing up to meet him. All his life, he has never truly forgiven his mother for this – but silently, inside, he thinks this might be where his admiration for the mountains was born and he thanks Hera without speaking the words. (She’d do nothing but laugh anyway.) Olympos isn’t his home, it never will be – but he respects and loves the mountain, with its steep slopes shrouded in swirling clouds, even if he doesn’t respect or love its inhabitants. The most fickle of beings chose the most unchangeable of homes. The gods are crazy to believe they dominate Olympos – Hephaistos knows it’s the other way around.

Of all the mountains in this beautiful land, that sighs under the terror of draught and fires or drowns in heavy rainfall, he loves Vesuvius the most. Vesuvius lies across the sea, where Greek explorers, aided by the gods (or plagued by them) landed and claimed the land as theirs. They claimed Vesuvius.

Vesuvius claimed Hephaistos from the very first look.

It’s the barrenness (so unlike Olympos), the deathly yet so fertile landscape, the smoke rising in tendrils from hidden cracks, Hephaistos thinks. Vesuvius leads into the very guts of the earth, where the air rises in curling trembling gusts and rocks are reduced to molten debris. It hurts. It enslaves. It addicts. He uses the mountain’s power to fulfil the gods’ warmongering needs. He only uses it, he doesn’t take it, he doesn’t create it. The fire is a gift and Hephaistos returns the favour by letting it do as it pleases. It’s the only thing that fire is grateful for. After years and years, Hephaistos can finally touch the running river of fire without feeling any pain.

The people of the fertile slopes of Vesuvius thrive. The first settlers were awed by the proportions of the volcano and worshiped it like a life-giving god (which it is, Hephaistos thinks – moreso than he is, at least). They took its riches and offered servitude and admiration in return. Vesuvius purred like a contented tiger in those days.

But humans are prone to forgetting. Soon they remembered nothing but their own glorious history and forgot the mighty part of the mountain in it. They snatched away the grapes and the tomatoes and forgot to thank Vesuvius.

Hephaistos had to flee to escape the mighty explosions of anger. Vesuvius had warned him – had blown great black clouds of smoke into his face and into the steely sky, had rumbled like a mighty stomach. His great, bellowing shouts of anger had been heard all across the sea. The day fled, a perpetual night in its place. And yet, the people hadn’t read the signs. They had stayed and gone to bed.

Their screams still haunt his dreams sometimes.


	14. Papyrus (Sappho/Aphrodite, PG)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Writing is divinity.

** Papyrus **

An unrolled scroll of papyrus is lying suggestively on her pillow, its smooth pale surface gleaming with virginity and newness. Coming into the room, she spots it immediately – it’s not where she left it, it’s not in the corner where she had thrown it to the floor in frustration and anger. The scent of the clean paper clings to the sheets of the bed as she goes to sit on it. The papyrus stares at her, open, welcoming, its colour like the beautiful flesh of the soft breasts of Atthis and Anactoria.

Sappho feels her resolve slipping away. Inside her the warmth has already started to burn again; that pleasurable yet unbearable itch that is only soothed by writing – it has always been this way. Ever since Aphrodite looked upon young Sappho and saw what was hidden inside the girl. Aphrodite ignited the flame and keeps it alive. The goddess knows Sappho craves the pen and the ink like she does sex. Her place in it all is not muse (but Sappho still thinks it is).

Sappho reaches for the papyrus. Its weight is immensely satisfying in her hand, and already she feels the verses forming themselves, streaming from her limbs to her head – words of the colours and the land and the sex and Aphrodite. The poetess firmly grasps the papyrus, her head swimming with something that could resemble drunkenness – but the wine she’s had at midday had been properly diluted to the customs of Lesbos. She’s intoxicated, but not by wine.

“Why, Aphrodite, do you send me these words? Why do you compel me to retrieve my pen when I have already decided to throw it away?” she prays out loud, eyes fixed on the inkwell.

Psappho, my beloved Psappho, Aphrodite thinks, I do not. Your actions are your own.

Sappho puts the pen to the paper just as Apollo’s chariot shows its face from above the clouds. The sudden warmth of the sun falling through the open windows fills Sappho’s limbs with tingling pleasure, her eyes staring at the light. She’s still praying, and now she’s writing – not looking at the paper but at the sun. Inside her the words come to her like moths to a flame and her mind is full full full – and the sun and the light and the pen on the papyrus makes Sappho close her eyes and bite the inside of her cheek. Her skin is being touched, being loved by unseen hands; she feels like the pen, she feels like the paper.

No, Aphrodite thinks smiling, feel like the word, Psappho. You are the word.

Sappho’s pen slips on the paper, leaving a thin streak of ink as the poetess grabs the sheets with her other hand and inside her something explodes, no, everything explodes, the colours the land the wine the sex the words.

Coming down from her high, Sappho sees the words she’s written: _some say that the fairest thing upon the dark earth is a host of horsemen_

Smiling, she picks up the pen and writes.


	15. Torment (Sisyphus, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The gods are not merciful.

**Torment**

 

At first he thought, when he could still think, that he had received the cruelest punishment possible: to lose track of time, to be suspended in a murky forever that will never change, that will never bring a breeze to his face to dry his ever-pouring sweat, that will never allow rays of sun to play across his brow, that will never grant him a second to stretch away the tensions piling upon one another in his shoulders and back.  
  
He remembers vaguely that he used to count, in the beginning of this task that has no end; count how many times he went up and how many he scuttled down again, following the quicker descent of the rock of his torment. For a while, he recalls, it was an obsession, this counting – until the numbers became so high that he couldn't find words to describe them anymore and even language forsook him, leaving him, utterly alone now.  
  
He remembers that he used to sing sometimes when going after the rock (during the push upward he couldn't spare the breath). But his voice grew thin as he forgot the words that he had known before. For a while he sang about his rock. Sang about darkness, roughness, blood, stone. But as the rock expanded and became his whole world, the only thing he saw, the only thing he dreamt about as his body continued to work, he lost the words about his rock too. His whole reality was hard, and dark, and utterly beyond naming.  
  
So now he does not speak or sing and remembers, sometimes, that he had a voice but cannot fathom what that was like. The only sounds he makes come from deep within; deep grunts of a pain and a labouring that is constant.  
  
Working his muscles, that almost creak at that point at the end of the slope, at the final point that should be the end but isn't, he pushes the rock up, once more, meaningless. It balances for a moment before, inevitably, rolling away from his hands, pulling him with it, down down down, once more, meaningless.  
  
There is a haze in his head and time keeps on slowing down around him; he hopes that one day maybe it will stop altogether. And, later he realised: that is his final torment – the final stroke of genius from the gods – that despite the fact that his grip on time is weakening more and more and this is a horrible punishment in itself, his hope still lives like a small fanned flame. Every time, _every time_ , he hopes that this time, maybe this time, he has exerted just the right amount of pressure and the rock will teeter, finding its balance, settling on an invisible point and staying there.  
  
Despite the fact that he has no language, and no mouth to use it with – despite the fact that his body is uncoiling itself in a sense, disassociating from what was once a working mind, flowing away like time itself – despite the fact that he will be here, on this hilltop, forever, forever, he still hopes. The greatest torment is that his hope still flares up every single time, like a loyal fire.  
  
The gods are not merciful, and do not think about him.


	16. Ending (Actaion, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An eternity of ending.

**Ending**

 

It only takes a moment.  
  
He knows they don't mean to, his hounds – he sees the angry foam sticking to the corners of their crazy mouths, sees how their teeth glitter in a way they never have before. Their eyes, glazed over and blazing at the same time (focused on something maddening that isn't really there). He forgives them already, knows that they've been struck by something larger than themselves (a thing which is a thousand times more intuitive than his careful love for them during hunting hours, his heedful hands on their sweating backs saying thanks). It's not their fault and it only takes a moment.  
  
A moment of no emotion in which he can only close his eyes as they bound towards him full of malice and base hatred – he sees, in seconds that stretch out behind his eyelids, how Artemis turned in the clear water with her servants' hands on her, body sun-spun wood-grown air-skinned and then he can't help but sigh. His last flicker of life is an escape of enamored breath and he can't care, can't feel anything other than a soft gratefulness for what he has seen.  
  
And then there is pain.


	17. Apple (Eris, PG)

**Apple**

 

The funniest thing is that she doesn’t remember a time when she didn’t exist. Her mother, when drunk on too much nectar, likes to tell her the story of her conception – mid-lovemaking Zeus called the wrong name (maybe Europa, maybe Antiope, maybe Leto – there were so many, so many that had been here, and here, and here and so many that had been undone by their love). Hera clawed at his face even as she was impregnated with his seed. She spat in his face. He told her she was an utter bitch. She told him in return he could take his fantasies elsewhere.  
  
It is a tale Eris doesn’t need to hear; the dry droning of her mother’s voice as she describes the hate.  
  
Hera tells her daughter: “You were destined to be what you are because of us. We infused you with our hate.”  
  
Eris feels the need to drown her in the bowl of nectar – but then that’s who she is, and she doesn’t always act on her desires even if she feels them beat in her veins. She seethes in silence because that is what she does.  
  
Despite the story of her conception, she can’t remember when she didn’t exist, she can’t remember ever hearing of a time when she didn’t exist. Thinking about it, she must have always been around because she is everywhere – ghostly fingers stretching out everywhere to mark human’s hearts and make them beat with anger.  
  
The thing about being a god, and being believed in, and being worshiped for what you do is that you _become_ what you do. Humans are small and insignificant but they, reliable and temporary and not worth remembering, at least have ways to grow in their life (even if their growth is snubbed out by the sudden silence of death). Eris feels superior to their tiny, antlike ways and yet is reminded of how stationary she is.  
  
No change.  
  
She is envious because she is envy. She doesn’t laugh over the conflicts she incites because she wishes she incited other conflicts – like the one Aphrodite manages to create, or Hera, or Zeus. She doesn’t enjoy seeing people break from their pitiful jealousy because she is never content and always on edge. She hates what she does because she wants to do something else.  
  
She wants to change – she wants to be better, she wants to be more beautiful, she wants to be the best. She knows, somehow, she will never be any of those things. All she can be is envious.  
  
She sighs and polishes the golden apple with her sleeve.


	18. Dream (Morpheus, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He sleeps like a newborn.

** Dream **

He sleeps like a newborn child, the dreams gossip amongst themselves, except he never was one. Yes, he was born once (even gods have felt the gravity pull of life – the all-compassing swimming in clear love tangible between our fingers and then the opening like a ground crumbling to give you away to the fall beneath, the unforgiving light on stony worlds, the watery love that slips away and something cruel that begins; the lifelong search for that love again). He was born once but he was never new.

Morpheus is an old spirit in a timeless body, nothing but heavy black skin like leather, heavy eyes with a hint of white beneath, arms so heavy they slip off the bed now and then, the heavy words he sometimes mumbles. Is he dreaming? The dreams think not, but maybe his are of another world. Maybe his aren’t fleeting shining glimpses of something unreachable (the world in a logic order and you the commander, or maybe the world laid bare to its most ugly fundations that make you scream as you start awake) but maybe his are life. If you sleep your entire life away there is no other life than the dream.

Curiously, he is aware. His sons (dark, silent, dreamy) flock around him to support his head when he speaks – when he speaks of who to punish, who to help, who to woo even as his eyes are closed, reaching inward. The dreams, hovering in a corner, waiting to be sent out, look at their master and wonder what it is those eyes see – can there be light inside flesh? Can there be a world between the ten centimetres that firmly separate forehead from back of head? Is there room between the marrow, the bone the blood the curiously swirling flesh for the spinning of stories?

The dreams murmur amongst themselves, speaking of newborn children (small, warm epiphanies in a dry world, beginnings still shining with the body-love) and ageless bodies (small like periods at the end of a sentence, rendered fragile and crisp in the falls, the endless falls) and how he unites both. Morpheus sleeps and doesn’t think about himself (rather, thinks in himself).

But maybe he is not inside himself. Maybe the body is the only place in which he doesn’t live. Maybe the stories are outside his head.

(Maybe the world is nothing but his dream.)


	19. Spring (Adonis/Aphrodite, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She has seen a thousands springs.

** Spring **

She has seen a thousand springs and she will see a thousand more.

It is the busiest time of year for her, and for Eros, who is constantly on the move and only finds time to absently kiss her on the cheek when he passes Olympos. She knows he’s thinking about falling in love himself.

She throws herself at her duties forcefully and makes the deltas and phalli of humans everywhere throb. The season of sex. It used to be a heady, intoxicating time of pleasure on her own altars.

Light is leaping off every mountain, colours explode on every branch. Olympos shrouds itself in clouds of perfume.

In the calm, warm touch of Zephyros, she finds no comfort than that of a lover gone.


	20. Symbol (Zeus/Ganymede, PG-13)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The oracles said he would be a symbol.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings: non-con

**Symbol**

 

He finds his fortune outside the newly built, shining and colossal walls of Troy, outside the beaten streets, their stones smooth and polished with the weight of every day’s citizens. His father is King and God and Myth and Beginning in this place, and sometimes he is like the city’s public possession. His face is everywhere – the most talented sculptors of Troy compete for the most realistic Tros statue – and in the evenings, Ganymede looks at his father and finds that he might like the statues’ faces better. Tros puts a hand on his shoulder and tells him the oracles said of Ganymede: “He will be a symbol.” Ganymede doesn’t know what to say and feels as if he has already let down his father, who dreams of symbols of triumph and wealth in a son who in return dreams of running away. He lets the hand drop off his shoulder.  
  
It is outside the walls he finds his peace. It is said to be dangerous in these times to leave the city, and his mother pleads with him not to go – but the sheep still need herding like they always did, even before the shining beacon of Troy arose in the plain, and Ganymede is still a herder at heart as if he wasn’t born a prince. The economic need is only an excuse, although it helps to convince his mother. He isn’t herding for Troy and its expanding wool industry, he is herding for his heart and the lull in its tense, tight rhythm of beating that makes his head pound. Being on the mountains with the sheep, in their stench, in the dry grass that scratches at his bare feet, he feels a calm stealing up his nerves that feels like an energised sleep.  
  
He will never know if it was this radiance of rest, of relaxation of the senses that drew Zeus to him (but afterwards he does think so, having felt the eternal tension in Zeus and the steely hardness in his kisses, how he moves in shaky ways and forces everybody to pretend they don’t notice this). It doesn’t matter, because he was unarmed and unequipped, unwilling to fight in this state of trance and most of all he had dreamt of going away. He was being taken away now, in bird’s talons that cut and scratched – he was borne away like an infant but it felt like he had fled the city himself. When Zeus kissed him, still looking sharp and birdlike and drawing blood with his teeth, Ganymede only felt his heart, leaping with joy at the distance between him and Troy. Zeus was all but gentle, ripped his clothes with long nails and thrust into him with hard erratic movements that hurt, that _hurt_ , that made Ganymede think of the sharp grass and the stinking sheep. Zeus cut him and there was blood. “I – love – you,” Zeus panted, biting his shoulder. (Ganymede said nothing, gasping for air, and had to think of his father and his father’s faces at every corner in Troy, how they had all said something about love; and symbols.)  
  
Zeus takes care of his lovers in a rough and unattached way, especially if he feels the lovers crave more of his tenderness. He arranges for Ganymede to pour the wine on Olympos, which is a post Ganymede feels conflicted about. His tutors would have told him to be pleased with the honour the gods bestow upon him, but Ganymede doesn’t know if the silences, the conversations that fall silent when he pours, the cold glances from the women are honour. He thinks of the sheep and how they pushed into his friendly hand in winter. Zeus thanks him gruffly for the wine during the day and fucks him relentlessly during the night; Ganymede feels raw in more than one way, and feels himself exposed under Zeus’ forceful hands (his skin seems to have slipped off, everything laid bare: the regrets the youthful wishes the sinful desires the murderous dreams). Zeus sees all of it and bites with sharp teeth.  
  
On warm days he spends time thinking of his father and the oracle. A symbol of triumph and wealth he is certainly not, nor is he a symbol of love (he is sure of it, tracing the bruises Zeus leaves – they are there even if he kisses them carefully afterwards). He is not a symbol of defiance for he was borne away like a child, and he is not a symbol of escape. He is a symbol of the world and how it repeats itself, how you wish for one thing but need another. How you return to your old desires when your new ones are fulfilled. How you learn what you had was good after all. How you lose the place in which you could find peace.  
  
Ganymede closes his eyes and dreams of flocks of sheep on green slopes, like low clouds, like heaven’s friendly foam descended on the plains.


	21. Birds (Philemon/Baucis, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Philemon likes the birds.

** Birds **

Philemon is always happy to see the birds come. They’re tiny and loud and the little females are brown and the little males are black-blue, puffing up their thin bird chests to impress the girls. They bring the sun on their wings and with it the weighing down of Philemon’s branches with bursting, ripening fruit. The sun wakes every day a little earlier and warms the grain and his old tree trunk and the birds’ nests. The most beautiful moment is when he wakes up one day – a different one each year – to the sun peeking over the temple and the encouraging twittering of parent birds. The babies jump fearlessly from his body, trusting Zephyros instinctively. If trees could smile, Philemon would.

Mostly he likes to see the birds come because he knows how much Baucis loves them. Before, she used to feed the birds every leftover they had – even if that wasn’t much. She had her favourites that she, in the course of the years, taught how to sit in her hair and the hollow of her collarbone. One of Philemon’s favourite memories is Baucis, sparkling with youth and her hair aflame in the sunshine, scooping up a young infant bird, not yet fully feathered, and reaching upward (so her blouse crept up and showed him a delicious stretch of olive skin) and putting the baby bird back in its nest.

Their eternal hug tightens slightly when the birds come. He feels her joy. He feels his own.

He loves the birds.


	22. Fate (Medusa/Poseidon, PG-13)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She knows she is beautiful, and she knows she is dangerous.

**Fate**

 

Medusa knows she is beautiful, and at the same time she knows she is dangerous. To her beloved father, her dear mother, her blossoming flowers of sisters for whom she secretly fears the same fate, she knows she will eventually mean death. Even moreso, she knows it is what she will bring upon herself.  
  
On good days she only spares herself small glances in mirrors and ignores the small frissons of wonder and a strange, twisted desire running up her spine at the glimpse of her own radiance. On good days, she is sure she can fight whatever relentless force it is inside her that makes her want to fall into lakes to be with her own image forever.  
  
On bad days she thinks about fate. And what that might mean.  
  
It means, she thinks on that one bad day, that fateful bad day, that she cannot say no when one who not only matches her every step of the way but even surpasses her in beauty presents himself to her. It is a fateful day because she knows that she should stop and pray the rest of the day away to save herself, but something is exercising itself and it is not her will.  
  
She knows it is wrong when he comes to her in the temple, she _knows_. She knows the statue of Athena is looking down on them and she knows that if she wants to fight the risks, the dormant dangers that have been running hot in her blood all her life, this is her time. She knows but she does not say no. She thinks of fate. She thinks of fate the entire time.  
  
Yes, he is splendid, Poseidon. She does not know how old he is and she doubts he could tell her – it does not matter much as he is strong and lean and of a length that is impossible for her to embrace. It does not matter much but it does make her think about her life and how his must be so different. She cannot forget this thought even as he kisses her with an abandon that she would not expect from one who has all of eternity, as his hands stray from where they were on her neck to linger like question marks on the swell of her budding breasts. It surprises her how much he is like a sea, even though it should not – he is cool on her, moves his body like a wave. He hides darkness under a deceiving calm. On his lips she tastes salt. He is a lover of many talents, having had the time to learn everything or even maybe having been born with all knowledge of love already in him, and yes, he is splendid as his tongue dips into her navel and then lower, until she is pulling at his hair and pressing her thighs against the sides of his face, forgetting about the fact that he is a god. When he kisses her again she can only be willing when he guides his member into her almost too easily, making her a woman, breaking every promise she has ever made to Athena. Even then she does not forget the thought that his life must be different from hers – she watches his face as he thrusts into her, and she wonders what it must be like to never fear. Never fear death. Never fear forces other than your own. It is impossible to imagine and it is like a veil over her pleasure, even if he is splendid, even if everything in her says yes.  
  
He leaves her with what seems like a genuine warmth, and assures her that everything will be okay. She knows it will not and can only watch him leave in silence, contemplating that this might be the last day of her life, of her life with men, of her life with beauty of any kind. She sees him go and wonders how he feels; does he even realise how condemned she is?  
  
She leans back against a pillar of the temple and starts to wait. A storm appears to be coming, but she cannot say for sure. It might be her heart she hears, beating against her skull. She looks at her goddess's face as it gleams golden in the darkening gloom.  
  
She closes her eyes as she feels her hair beginning to slither down her neck, alive.


	23. Facing East (Europa/Zeus, PG)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She was a daughter of kings, yet she only wanted one thing.

**Facing East**

 

She was a daughter of kings, yet the only thing she wanted was a room facing east so she could see the sun rising. Her father Agenor – having held her bloody, slimy, utterly new form in his arms, staining his splendid gold-encrusted robe and gazing down in a tiny face, a tiny will, a tiny new grandness – had always wanted to give his daughter all the things in his power to give.  
  
All she wanted was a room facing east to wake up with the sun on her face.  
  
So Agenor instructed the finest architects of his land to build his daughter a sleeping chamber that would never make sleep elude her or bad dreams find her. A room with a view on Apollo’s rising face. They built it to the letter (except they had no power over the bad dreams – no one does).  
  
Europa dreamt the sweetest dreams, the light curtains of her window softly blowing over her face. The room was high and it was light and there were mirrors – in the mornings there were hundreds of suns, all landing in her eyes.  
  
(Sometimes, Agenor worried she would go blind this way, but then she kissed his beard and told him not to take this joy away from her.)  
  
Her friends trooped at her window every morning until she came out to play. They could’ve arranged to meet outside, in the grass, but the lure of the sun-castle was stronger. A beacon in the shady morning. Every morning they closed their eyes against the glow of a hundred suns and then Europa was a bright light sliding out from her sheets, smiling, smiling.  
  
They had different games, but Europa was the star (no, the sun) in all of them – she caught the ball, she drew the lines, she decided who won the race. She was the first to shrug off her fine robes off her shoulders and go swimming in the sea. The sea, warm with her presence, the land across, waiting for her to bring the light. The world was waiting.  
  
Zeus, cold from living with Hera, had eyes for light, for curtains of sunshine tumbling down a shimmering back. Her mouth was warm honey. She was life and he wanted to take it – and give it back. Olympos, cold cold Olympos. He left his wife in her bed.  
  
Meeting Apollo on the way, he said: “Make the sun rise.”  
  
Apollo understood (as always) and did.  
  
The playing maidens, the flowing honey on the plain. The sea lapping hungrily at the warm sand, luring – please come here. Please. Zeus disguised himself as the moon and as opposites attract, it worked. The white bull, the golden maiden. The sea carried them contentedly, even as Europa clung to Zeus in fear.  
  
In the afterglow of their love-making, he said: “I will build you a house made out of glass. The sun will be everywhere and you will be in it forever.”  
  
She smiled at him.  
  
He rested his hand on her forehead, felt warm all over. He told her: “This will be your land.”  
  
And that is what happened.


	24. Devour (Charybdis, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The water never fights.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning: minor character death

**Devour**

 

The water. The water the water the water. There’s dead fish, and still-living fish who are dead the next time, and the water remains salty and muddy each time she drinks. She drinks. Too deeply, too wantonly; she almost drowns every time, and feels angry because it never truly happens.  
  
The water is powerless. She is the power behind it, although the fishermen and the travellers are lost in their superstitions and pray to Poseidon. (Poseidon, Poseidon, who visited her once and was eaten once, almost, even he, _even he_. The fishermen only cry **Charybdis** when they are already lost and their god, who received their incense and their wives’ tears, has lost control of them.) She wishes the water would fight but it can’t. It flows in and out and it remains careless either way. It has no eyes to see the darknesses of her insides. It has no skin to feel the freedom outside her.  
  
She loves the boats. The men, no, they are only tiny, specks of dust; only the split second of a scream and then the limpness of Hades. Instead the boats: they resist. They creak and break and tense their dark woods. She breaks them eventually.  
  
Sometimes she loves the boats that make it past her. Those are the days she counts the dead fish. The number never changes.  
  
The sea never changes.


	25. Awakening (Zephyros, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He changes to the sound of the years.

**Awakening**

 

Zephyros likes being caught in the maelstrom of earth's seasons. It is a change to set your life to – steady, reliable, like breathing, like a heartbeat. It brings him to the core of what it means to be alive even if he isn't, really. It's different for him and he knows, but he shares in what humans think is life. He, too, changes to the sound of the years and the sun and the stars.  
  
Winter on earth is skidding to a stop. The ice has already cracked and the snow has melted into the ground, heating up, nourishing to life a new generation of sleeping seeds.  
  
He leaves his cave early in the morning. The sun is still weak, stretching and yawning in the east. Its rays tentatively explore the leftovers of winter – dark, stark trees like razors in a still-dry earth; waters gaining slowly increasing momentum under thinning layers of ice; people blinking in the early morn with new light in their eyes.  
  
He flings himself off the rock with ease. Despite the roiling of his stomach as he flies he has done this a thousand times and will do it a thousand times more. Even with his eyes closed he would know what the awakening land under him would look like, but today he looks – spies eagerly for the tell-tale signs of early, delicate-looking but hard-souled flowers that can withstand a late frost or of the first, still firmly closed buds that soften the knife-like look of tree branches. It is still beautiful after the thousandth time.  
  
He swoops down, stirs hardy grass, joins forces with the sun (rolling its muscles in the east, ready to dispel the last fogs of frost) and feels his blood running hotter. The soft whisper of his presence softens the earth as brave, fragile, burgeoning life pushes at it from beneath.  
  
Yes, he changes to the sound of the years, but then too the years change to the sound of him.


	26. Imprint (Hephaistos/Aphrodite, Aphrodite/Ares, PG-13)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He has to wash this imprint off somehow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning: adultery

**Imprint**

 

He knows what she is doing because, despite what she may think, he has claimed at least a little part of her in marrying her, in sharing her bed even if she was cold and discontent under her warmed-up skin. She has never loved him, not in the sense that she looked upon him and felt something igniting somewhere under her heart – but she has fucked him (even if it was only a couple of times) and that is when he gathered as much of her as he could. Skin under fingernails, fingerprints on shoulders, lashes fluttering close on a throbbing neck. He has sampled her desperately, knowing this was only a temporary thing and that the disdain would soon overcome the need again. He has memorised her body under his fingers so he can still feel it, even if it has been a long time since it was really there.  
  
This way, he has come to know her in an intimate sense that she doesn’t seem to have noticed. This way, he feels it when she steps out of line.  
  
He cannot deny that somewhere, it hurts. It hurts again even though she is simply doing what she has always done, unbound by these strange shackles of commitment (or Zeus forbid, love). He knows of her preferences; lean lithe warriors still smelling of sweat and blood or young maidens with flowers on their bellies leading down down. He is neither. He is nothing. He is crippled and bitter (tastes bitter). Nevertheless she has succumbed to him more than once, even if it was with lips curling in disgust. This gives him some solace in the fire-warmed night of his mountain, and this also gives him some grief. (Ever onwards from being thrown down down from Olympos his feelings have been nothing if not complex, twofold.)  
  
Basically: he hates her. Hates everything about her, how she wears her unblemished skin carelessly on her shoulders and moves – oh moves – with the grace of everything that bursts into life at the beginning of spring and does not know what ‘winter’ means. He hates it because at some point he may have loved it and she has kept it away from him (kept it away from him even more intensely because once or twice she _has_ given it to him).  
  
The only comfort he has: to have gathered her in his hands and to have held some essence of her when she ran away, to know what makes her tick (sometimes), to still feel her even if she has nothing but disinterested gazes to spare. He knows what she’s up to and he has been planning his revenge carefully to drown out the little pinpricks of hurt in his pain-spun body. (There are different kinds of pain as he knows better than anyone, but this small burning might, for all its tameness, be the worst.)  
  
It’s only appropriate that it should be a net, for her with all her ensnaring of another’s senses, her coiling around another’s body (capturing capturing, to take a prey and to make it believe it is safe in this cage of thinly worn love and sex). He draws the ropes out from Vesuvius’ steaming mouth, hands blistering (another pain, this one manageable) and eyes tearing from the smoke. Vesuvius lends captivating power and that is what Hephaistos needs.  
  
He sneaks up on them (or: simply walks up to them as they do not even find the cover of night to disguise their secret escapades) and watches them for a moment; sees Ares grabbing desperately for something tangible to hold amidst the fleeting pleasures of her mouth, her hands, her throbbing cunt – somewhere Hephaistos feels a twinge of sympathy for the rocking, curling god of war, reduced to a child looking for its mother’s breast in this deepest point of sex sex sex. Aphrodite’s body bears the promises Hephaistos once read with his hands, and he wonders if Ares knows that they are not for him but for all who get access to that body, that shining expanse of everything that is sex and spring (and not love)?  
  
He shakes his introspections off his body and throws his net. It burns the lovers more fiercely than their lust and they scream and jerk and manage to still come before starting to fight the constricting ropes.  
  
He looks at them, feels the pinpricks of hurt in every point of his body. Calls everyone else to try and share the pain. He doesn’t know if it will work, but he has to wash this imprint off somehow. Anything will do.


	27. Feet (Iris/Hermes, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The same.

** Feet **

They have the same job. Maybe they even have the same life.

Maybe they share their moments even when they think they’re alone, and maybe they only have one heart (to share – maybe that’s why she can only really laugh when he’s there).

They send different messages to everyone (Hermes mostly neutral, sometimes-bad, war-related, red words, burnt black and blood on his mouth when he comes back – Iris mostly womanly, sometimes-fickle, alive with children, touching white woman’s shoulders and heart throbbing when she comes back). They send the same messages to each other.

She likes to walk barefoot and he doesn’t. That’s the only thing in which they differ. She enjoys the earth and maybe the sky as well, and she loves her feet over wide spaces, good to fall in, fall for a long time. Her feet are white. Her wake is every colour. He likes to be grounded, he likes to leave firm footprints. He likes his feet clean. He wears wings and thinks he trusts them more than his own legs.

She makes fun of him for it sometimes, but likes his wings secretly. He’s serious and doesn’t make fun of her, but does tickle her feet when he washes them.

They often walk together. No need for words. They’re the messengers and maybe they’re replaceable in a way. They walk together, bare-footed, wing-shoed, and fit together.


	28. The In-between Hour (Aglaia/Euphrosyne/Thalia, R)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She wears no clothing in this in-between hour.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning: incest

**The In-between Hour**

 

Their world is nothing other than sun and sex and sleep. They spend sun-filled hours languishing amongst soft sheets, trailing fine linen and fingernails and tongues over each other’s sweet-smelling skin – they find ways to fit together, again and again, and they fall into each other until they are spent thrice over, panting unintelligible words into the space (infinite yet non-existent) between the limits of their shining skin. At such times they hook elbows and ankles together into a voluntary chain – they are here and they are together, extensions of each other’s limbs, born together grown together.  
  
It is Aglaia who makes it happen: in the mornings when the blankets of clouds are still fine and young, she comes to her sisters, radiant as the sun piercing the early mist. She wears no clothing in this in-between hour (this hour in which Helios stirs and Selene has not yet taken to bed) and she is colourful in the greyness of night-morning.  
  
“Euphrosyne,” she whispers in the stone-silence, for it is Euphrosyne she seduces first – Euphrosyne who knows nothing of bearing children and yet protects the women who do (who loves, _loves_ the roundness of Aglaia in the morning, the full breasts with the nipples enticed to alertness by the chill, the belly that is soft and rosy in the gloom, giving way to wide, voluptuous hips). Although she pretends otherwise, Euphrosyne is always awake when Aglaia comes, always waiting. Aglaia slips into bed, her glowing sun-sister with her lips like roses, too-tall and too-beautiful (privately Euphrosyne thinks: thank Zeus for the morning’s colourlessness, for she would blind me otherwise – and then reaches upwards until they kiss and weave their fingers together, rocking slowly with only silk between them).  
  
They go slow – kiss kiss kiss, short and light, not intense yet – for they know light-footed Thalia is coming, wrapped in linen and with lit eyes that scare every darkness away. There she is, already – they do not hear her but they feel her standing close. The day is growing already, urged on by Thalia’s presence (she who brings joy to every movement, she who makes the flowers bloom).  
  
“Good morning,” she says as if in singsong prayer and plucks a rose from the bush growing by Euphrosyne’s window. Euphrosyne would return the greeting, except Aglaia is reaching down inside the silk, fingers skating over lush curves and into hidden places. A moan is everything Thalia gets from her sisters (and that is more than enough). She twirls the flower between her fingers and breathes in its subtle scent before trailing the head, with its satiny blood-red leaves, over the bare creaminess of Aglaia’s back. Aglaia makes a sound of approval and shivers. Euphrosyne starts freeing herself of her sheets, pulling the sleek material from in-between her body and her sister’s, their tangled limbs. Her still sleep-warm body is shocked to awareness by the morning’s chilly bite and it is only then that she truly kisses Aglaia: sucks her sister’s bottom lip between her teeth, nibbling for a moment, before thrusting her tongue past the boundary of Aglaia’s lips. They kiss deeply, bodies pressed together without barrier now, as Thalia drops her sheets to the floor (naked as the day they were born). They break the kiss to make room for her on the bed.  
  
“Good morning,” Aglaia finally says, breathless and lips swollen. Thalia smiles without showing her teeth, eyes shimmering. They begin: hands on necks, pulling in for the kiss, legs intertwining, lips catching on collarbones, trailing the rose infuriatingly lightly over sensitive thighs, Euphrosyne’s lips closing over Thalia’s nipple and then, oh then: moving around until they find the way, the rhythm. They move together – hands tongues teeth hair eyes lips hips cunts breasts – and they cannot stop, lick away at each other’s thighs until they tremble out the names aglaiaeuphrosynethalia. Thalia thrusts her fingers deeply inside Euphrosyne’s willing cunt while Aglaia lies beneath her, kissing her sex until it is dripping and swollen and _oh_. They switch, do it again, play the other roles and come, come, come in the glorious light of hours later. In the sun-glow they catch their breath for minutes and lie like one, together.


	29. Fire (Leto/Zeus, PG)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Her childhood dream was half fulfilled, but the most important part of it had been destroyed.

**Fire**

 

Back when she was still young and new, her father would pick her up (bring her to his grand, titanic level) and reach her upward to the heavens. He asked her, eyes closed against the sun-halo around her head: “What would you want most in the world, if you could choose anything, my Leto?” She said what she longed for in the golden dreams of young girls: “To see the world and to understand it.” He put her down with a smile tugging at his mouth and a weight pulling at his shoulders.  
  
If there was one fire in her veins, it was the desire to stretch her body over the earth, from pole to pole – to set foot after foot on the harshness of the ground and, after a while, to find it soft under her toes like the intimately sampled and remembered body of a lover. She wished to let every grain of sand on Greece’s beaches stream between her fingers and know all of it (all of the land, the mountains, the seas). She longed to sit on the rocky homes of gods until she was a rock herself (and maybe, in the deeply hidden recesses of her feverish young-woman dreams; a goddess as well).  
  
It’s how Zeus spotted her, a beacon burning red-hot on the cool stone. She had climbed a mountain until the unfriendly rock would support her no longer, and now she was balancing on the edge of a steep fall. She was – a fire at the edges of a cold sleeping giant, nursing blood-red fingers that had left shimmering marks on the grey face of the earth. Zeus, who spent his days with skies that trembled pale blue under his command, longed for red (her hair, beating like a warning flag, her blood her dress the inside of her mouth). He came to her and pried her gently from the rock (made her a goddess, revelling in her heat).  
  
Afterwards, he asked her why she had been perched there, on an edge that only those who the gods have condemned have seen.  
  
She said: “But you have condemned me.”  
  
Confused, he said: “I do not condemn those I love.”  
  
She ran a finger over his neck (the still neck, without the tell-tale beat of human veins) and painted him like a warrior with her red-stained fingers. “You bring me too close to the maddeningly elusive insight in the world,” she said.  
  
He could say nothing, except maybe this: “but I _love_ you” to which she could say nothing except that she did not.  
  
He left her with a glowing residue of her body’s heat still on him, and told her he would protect her, look after her from the crackling skies – “No storm will ever harm you,” he finished and kissed her, kissed her blood-red mouth and bit her lips to have more of it. He couldn’t understand she didn’t want his protection, she wanted his indifference – let me be tricked by the world and its people, let me be struck by lightning. Maybe it will make me understand.  
  
When he left she immediately realised she was pregnant. Doubly so, and in the night’s chill, resting her hands on her stomach, she imagined the multiplication had happened when she had been split inside herself (two Leto’s, the one that had happened, kissing Zeus in the red of an evening sun and the other that could have happened, running barefoot on the rock away from his cold advances – somehow, to compensate for the half of her that was missing, she had doubled what she had received).  
  
In the swiftly growing darkness, she told her slowly growing children: “I wish for you the easy contentment of your father, not the relentless fire of your mother.” She already knew the wish would be in vain as she felt how warm her stomach was. She slept anxiously, not used to the heat in her gut.  
  
When morning came, she was ready to leave. She felt strengthened by the knowledge of the company she was keeping now (the treasure, the two-fold love to make up for the emptiness when Zeus embraced her). She felt young and fresh, and the idea of having to go until she no longer could was thrilling; to go the earth, to know the earth until she was part of it. Somehow she knew Hera was looking for her – but she would walk to the edge of the earth, where Hera’s eye didn’t reach. She was determined thrice over.  
  
The chase began – the first days were slow and easy, feeling her way over a ground that was still friendly. Eventually the colour of the sand changed, though – and she was no match for mother earth herself, who had been pregnant a hundred times over and who bore Hera a warm heart. The great women of the universe, united against her.  
  
There was no rest for Leto – there was no sleep, there was no sitting at a river to close her eyes for a moment. Even worse, there was no travelling (there was only moving, never stopping, never looking where she was or who was there with her). Her childhood dream was half fulfilled, but the most important part had been destroyed. She saw the world and she didn’t understand, was bewildered in this hostile attack on every fibre of her ever swelling body. At night, sobbing in relentless fatigue, she cried against Gaia, let her tears seep into the ground – but the earth was solid and cold under the warm bulge of Leto’s children waiting in their safe seas.  
  
Zeus, looking down and feeling his heart burn, tried to help. Leto, proud and cold when thinking of him, avoided all of his safe passages and chose the hard ones (the ones with water pounding against her, with the earth falling away, with the cliffs, the cutting rocks, the shaking sands). He called out for her from the heavens, trying to get to her (but she turned away and hid so he couldn’t see her anymore).  
  
It was the ultimate defeat, eventually – in labour and without a place where her feet could stay for over a moment, she cried hot tears on her cold cheeks and looked up to Zeus. He commanded the earth to still, and found dry sands that still looked up to him as their master. He made her a bed of cold leaves and wet grass, feeling distinctly human.  
  
He lingered for a moment, but she wailed: “You have condemned me.” And she cried and bled until he ran, back up to the indifferent clouds that could make him pretend he didn’t see.  
  
“You have condemned me,” she said again and then there it was: her own shattering, the sky blazing red behind her eyelids, the earth-blinding pains and suddenly, the tentative hope lighting up in the bloodied sand; two small beginnings to start where she had stopped. They lay cradled in her arms, warming her breasts. They were there, and they were what she had been (the potential, the power). They were her. Shining like stars. Crackling like night-time fires.  
  
She slept, finally, warm, heart to heart to heart.


	30. Mirror (Niobe, PG)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She loved her body, because it bore the traces of her possessions.

** Mirror **

Sometimes, she ordered her servants to bring her looking-glasses as tall as men. They brought them, faces clouded, eyes cast, using soft cloths to protect the precious metals from their fingers. They disapproved. She had them whipped for it, sometimes, when it was too obvious in the set of their mouths. They were only servants.

She loved the looking-glasses and only looked in them sparingly, making it something to look forward to. They sat covered with soft cloths until she ordered that they be brought to her and uncovered.

With the coverings pulled back, she was suddenly, almost shockingly, staring at herself.

Alone with only herself, then, she carefully removed her royal jewellery and slipped her magnificent chiton off her shoulders until her nakedness was staring her in the eye.

She was paler underneath her clothes – her belly was almost white, glowing milk-bleak. She took the softness of it between her fingers and tugged gently. A mother's stomach, having borne fourteen children, it was pulled down, loose. She loved how it jiggled when she allowed herself a movement. It was soft, rounded, empty now – but it had given her her pride.

Her breasts were of the same material, but even softer, with a blue shine of her blood pulsing underneath the white skin. They hung complacently, resting on the beginning older-woman bulge of her stomach. Her nipples were darker than the other skin, large, at rest. She remembered how her children had suckled at it and how it had taken only the merest sound from their cribs for her nipples to spring to attention, leaking fluid. They were drier now, her children adults. She cradled her bosom in her hands and enjoyed the heaviness of it.

Her body showed what she had. She had the greatest pride any woman could have. She smiled at her reflection glowing pale, and closed her eyes at the thought: 'no one can ever take this away'.


	31. Vertigo (Hera, PG)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ironically, Hera is deeply afraid of heights.

**Vertigo**

 

Ironically, Hera is deeply afraid of heights.  
  
She was born, pushed out of her giant mother’s wide and deep birth canal and found herself suspended in mid-air. Her grandfather was Ouranos, the sky. Her grandmother was Gaia, the earth. At the time of her birth, the two were in the process of the ultimate divorce. Heaven and earth were not connected at that time. Rhea, being upset by the prospect of losing another child to the greed of her husband, was too preoccupied with her own misery to notice her newborn floating about. The umbilical cord still intact, Hera slowly rotated in a space that was distinctly in pain, ripped apart as it was by Ouranos en Gaia’s marital conflict. This is the most intense memory Hera has (as if the waiting in her father’s stomach with her brothers and sisters, trying to avoid being digested, had troubled her sense of observation from that point onward). Ever since, she needs the steadiness of flat earth beneath her feet.  
  
She hates being afraid. She is a queen and a goddess and it doesn’t do to have the fears of humans. So she confronts her fear time and time again, and makes a sport out of leaning forward on Olympos. She watches the humans below and tries not to give into to the horrible sinking in her entire body. She descends to earth in the wake of Iris to bless and curse people. Every time she balances on the edge. She never falls. She only falls in her dreams.  
  
The beginning of the turning point occurs when she looks into the face of her son and feels a deep, black, crackling disgust fill her mother’s heart where love should lie. Hephaistos is nothing short of a monster, slimy with birth residue and scarred permanently. If she were not a goddess, she would think it was the punishment of the gods for the place of Hephaistos’ conception – she seduced Zeus on the slopes of Olympos that fall away to make way for air. Zeus had to hold on to tender leaves of grass to stop them from rolling down. But she doesn’t think this. She’s a goddess herself.  
  
As it is, she doesn’t wonder about the pure humanity of bearing a handicapped child. She is simply dismayed and wonders how she can hide the newborn from the other gods. Especially Aphrodite, that bitch.  
  
Something erratically burning inside of her urges her to the edge of the mountain’s top with her son in her arms. She glances down, feels the familiar swoop in her stomach, but finds that it is soon replaced by the sheer dislike for the ugly creature that she’s holding. She doesn’t hesitate. She drops Hephaistos over the edge and sees him go. She sees him go all the way down.  
  
She feels a change then.  
  
But it’s not completed until her son returns to Olympos, his ugliness only surpassed by his hate. He is so like her and she knows that if he had been perfect and his mother had been imperfect, he would’ve let _her_ fall, too. He doesn’t know it yet, but he has all of infinity to figure it out. He fights her at first. He hates all of them, those stuck-up gods high and mighty on their throne. He’s naïve and young enough to see himself as something different, as if he’s not the son of his father and his mother. But he is. And he falls prey to their soothing words.  
  
He takes residence on Vesuvius and makes the mountain spew fire. She watches him often, and it is only after some times that she remembers that she is perched dangerously on the edge of Olympos to do so. She’s not afraid.


	32. Burning Up (Hades/Persephone, G)

** Burning Up **

“I thought the dead didn’t contract diseases.”

He huffed, even though the cool hand on her forehead stayed relaxed. “They don’t. That is, if you don’t consider death to be a disease.”

She smiled in the dark, pushing her face up against his hand. It was soothing. “There is no cure for it, is there? Therefore, it is not a disease.”

“Sometimes there is.”

And she stayed silent at that, hazily remembering how Orpheus had played for them and how it had reminded her of her mother’s hair and the sun on ripe grain. Already she was falling into a fever sleep again, in which the sun penetrated the underworld and Styx swallowed her.

He kissed her burning forehead. “You are not dead.”

She slept.


	33. Carrying (Zeus, PG)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He carries them all, some more so than others.

**Carrying**

 

Being a father brings consequences.  
  
Zeus remembers when he asked Hephaistos to cleave his skull in two to rid him of that pounding headache that was making the clouds crackle with electricity. Hephaistos complied, unknowingly being the soot-stained midwife for one of Olympos’s strangest births. Athena was born on the edge of a blade and that’s how she’s lived ever since, springing from her father’s brow in all of her glory. Do gods ever experience childhood? Zeus finds that he can’t remember his, though the humans on earth tell each other stories about it.  
  
Athena, alongside with Dionysos, is the most intimate of Zeus’s children. Both were born twice – once; being pushed out of their mothers, twice; being pushed out of their father. Zeus feels strangely responsible for their somewhat paradoxical godly duties (Athena, with all of her wisdom and yet her love for war – Dionysos, the blurry god of wine and yet the only one that rivals Apollo’s orderly reason) as if being born twice has automatically given them two lives. It makes sense in a way. Zeus has felt the confusing, dizzying, awe-inspiring excess of emotion that comes with pregnancy. He has many children; he has only truly carried two of them.  
  
He feels strongly about all of his children, but finds that it is wearing to keep a fatherly eye on all of his descendants. He has too much of them. Confusingly, he’s bursting with pride over every achievement his mortal or immortal children accomplish and yet he wishes they were never born. Being a parent has been more than following his lustful loins and watching the consequences from afar. He hadn’t expected that. He hadn’t foreseen the powerful rush of relief as one of his lovers survives a childbirth, no matter how pestered by Hera. He hadn’t foreseen the love that infuses him every time, every time again, like a shock running up his nerves, when he sees his children growing up and being loved and making him proud. He hadn’t expected wanting to rip the earth apart in fury when one of his is being treated unfairly.  
  
He doesn’t like things to happen that he hasn’t foreseen. He loves his children yet hates them deeply. He falls in love with them whenever he sees how much they mirror their mothers or himself. He hates how his mortal children expect things from him he can’t provide. He hates it just as much when they expect nothing. The depth of the influence they have on him is something he can’t stand.  
  
He takes care of them in ways they don’t understand or better yet: don’t notice. He refuses to make their lives flow smoothly – instead he lets the Fates do their job and only nudges his sons and daughters on earth gently into the right direction now and then. Mostly he helps them get up again when they fall. He’s not supposed to play favourites, even though he does. He tries to do it subtly.  
  
Sipping ambrosia, he oversees his worldly empire rising and falling in green plains away from Olympos. Apollo is sending his chariot to the west and Zeus enjoys the last rays of sunshine on his brow. His children on earth and mountain alike are preparing for bed.  
  
They may not know it, but he’s watching over them.


	34. Closer (Aphrodite/Ares, PG-13)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She's not sure she likes this.

  
**Closer**

  
She's not sure she likes this.  
  
She's not usually one to refuse closeness with her lovers; she loves the mingling of sweat and come and saliva and she loves how it dries quickly, as they still pant, as they still cling to each other. She loves how some of her lovers press their hips against hers as they drift off to sleep, as if trying to get her to stay (of course, she doesn't, but she still loves it). She loves how she sometimes carries nail marks on her back or thighs, like trophies that she's not ashamed to display when she returns to Olympos. She loves how her lovers amongst the gods are no different than the ones below – they all cry, they all yell, they all pull at her hair until there is gold between their fingers.  
  
But this? This is different and she's not sure she likes it.  
  
Adonis is naked, which she appreciates (she can see his pulse in his neck, and she can see it in his stirring cock; she can see how his teeth pull at his reddening lips; there is a slight sheen of sweat on his strong chest; she notices with pleasure how his fingers are tense, as if trying to reach out to her or maybe to himself – so yes, she definitely appreciates it), but he sits at the end of the bed and looks at her. He doesn't fall into her. He doesn't touch her.  
  
It is not what she expected and it is somewhat confusing. Of course she is not self-conscious as she leans back, because she knows her nude form is enticing to say the least, and she can see in his face that he can't believe what he's seeing. But that is it, that is it exactly – he's _seeing_ , he's watching her, instead of biting at her neck and kneading her breasts he is silent and looks at her. His eyes, too-clear, too-blue to be true, are trained on her face and while they sometimes slip down to her body they always come back up. She can't remember anyone having looked her in the eye for so long, nor so unreadably; there is nothing in his face to suggest that he's getting ready to pounce, that he's making plans to make love to her. Instead, there is a calmness and a wonder. While the signs of his body are plain enough for her to see that he's aroused, his face shows nothing of the kind.  
  
She stares back, feeling her own wonder growing. His face is beautiful – of course it is, it's almost a given, as she has chosen him for a lover – but it is also strange. She cannot read it and she's not used to that at all. As the minutes slip by them, she gets the strange feeling, like another burning underneath the tingling of her arousal, that this is a closeness of lovers that she has never before experienced. He's looking at her like she's interesting in ways that no one ever has noticed before.  
  
She swallows, her mouth is like sand. Something is fluttering inside her belly and it takes her some time to realise that she's nervous (the goddess of love! nervous!) and she almost laughs, but holds it in, because the silence between them is deepening even more and it's a plunge that yes, she does seem to want to take.  
  
She sees the tiniest twitch of his face in this intensifying stare. She sees how some of his hair is plastered to the sweat on the side of his face. She sees how one of his teeth, the one that she sometimes drags over his bottom lip, is slightly crooked.  
  
When he does come closer to her, he does it so slowly that she almost can't tell. When he is nose to nose with her (the first contact of their bodies), she is astonished at the speed of her heart beat, which is pounding in her ears. His eyes flutter to a close, now (she can feel his lashes against her own), and the kiss that she experiences eyes open, stunned by this newness, is hard enough to make her desire flare again, but she can also tell that some of his strange, calm wonder at her is in it, and for a moment she wishes fervently for him to feel her wonder at him, too, and she hopes he does, and then that thought is gone, because she feels his crooked tooth against her upper lip as he folds open his mouth and presses his tongue against her lips and every thought is gone now, every thought except for the one about his tooth and his tongue, and now there is a hand on her as well, lightly, on her shoulder of all places but it is still like a burn and it is the first time that she is the one who feels like crying and yelling and pulling at hair.  
  
She thinks one last thing, _Oh no_ , when he puts his other hand on her, like making a fire – she thinks oh no because she knows that this is nothing like any other time, oh no, she will be the one to want him to stay, she will want to sleep with his hips against hers, and she didn't think it was possible but it is, she pulls at him to come closer and he is the one who keeps his distance until he wants to give it up – and he _does_ want to give it up, but he does it slowly and by the time he is inside her with her legs hooked around his hips, his lips on her pulse in her neck, she thinks she might be in love.  
  
She knows she is in love.


	35. Wait (Prometheus, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the darkening evening, he waits.

**Wait**

 

The slope is silent and there is a hesitant, lukewarm breeze playing around his softly tinkling chains. The evening is beautiful and something is wrong; although his arms hurt and his legs are starting to ache in dull, slow throbs, he’s relatively okay. He’s in one piece. He’s still got his eyes, his arms, his other useful limbs. He’s alive. He’s not slowly bleeding out a penalty of never-ending physical agony.  
  
Even more strangely, nothing is tormenting him. The slope is deep but the sky is blue, and he’s securely fastened to the rock. At first he thought maybe the chains were designed to give way slowly, slowly until he could feel his muscles fighting and turning to stone trying to stall the infinitely slow fall. But the chains are silent and secure. The air is nice – and there _is_ air around him, he can feel his lungs filling up with it, pure and sharp, the cooling evening purring, coiling like a loyal pet around his feet. He feels rather pleasant.  
  
If there is one thing that’s bothering him, it’s the idea of infinity, of this view – this view that would be appreciated all over Greece tonight, a clear sky without secrets, only sparkling stars giving away their light – pasted over his eyelids forever. This breeze – that would cool the heads of feverish children and soothe the ache of the elders’ bones – playing with his clothes forever, until he pushes forward, longing for something less mellow, less soft (and then to meet the icy bite of the chains). That idea is like a fly in the warmth of the evening, troublesome, slightly worrying.  
  
Is that the torment?  
  
No, it couldn’t be.  
  
Something is wrong because he is too alive and he is too okay. He remembers the lightning that set the sky ablaze, the rolling thunders, the sun chariot leaking heat and running enraged swift circles in a storm sky. The gods, spitting on him, shouting, screaming in deep otherworldly voices. They were _angry_. This can’t be it. This calm isn't natural, even this short after the storm.  
  
In the darkening sky, the fear starts to gather in his gut. Something is coming, even if he doesn’t know what, and in one clear lucid moment he thinks: maybe this is the torment, this ever-growing fear of something that might come but never will –  
  
Prometheus listens in, vaguely notices the harsh, eerie cry of an eagle approaching. The evening is dark like death. Insides hammering, he closes his eyes and starts to wait.


	36. Chains (Andromeda/Perseus, PG)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Her eyes are fire amidst all this water.

**Chains**

 

He can smell the danger coming from the sea, and his head is hammering: free her, now, quickly! But he’s standing there, silent as her prison rock, and feels his breath wear thin as he watches the strain of the heavy chains that leave angry marks on her sea-whipped reddening skin, the struggling of her heaving breasts against the see-through chain-ripped material of her thin sacrificial garment. Her hair, loose and heavy with salt, whips against her mouth, gets stuck on her chapped lips, her damp cheeks. There is blood on her legs; the unfriendly rock, the biting ice of the ocean wind against her skin has polished her until she is raw and bleeding red onto the grey. Her eyes are fire amidst all this water. Although he is there to save her, she is still fighting, still pulling at the chains – and he knows then that he loves her, and forever will, and wants to warm himself at her fire, save her and then let her run free on her own terms. It takes him a moment before he can bring himself to shatter the chains, because her eyes are so bright they almost make his heart stop.


	37. Sails (Aigeus, G)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aigeus looks at that line, that line where the world ends, and waits for sails.

**Sails**

 

It is impossible to tell where the world ends.  
  
He should know because he stares at its boundaries every day, as around him the flowers of spring melt into the abundant fields of summer before shrivelling again into the crisp browns of fall and the colourless shells of winter, as people around him live and cry and die, as his eyes grow increasingly watery and glassy. He stares at that line, that line that never changes but that is also never really there, where the sea blurs into the sky in that shade of blue where he supposes the gods dine. Sometimes, when he looks at it and forgets to blink, the water in his eyes makes the end of the world shimmer. Sometimes, he sees sails of white. But then he blinks, and it was only the sun, winking, cruel on his brow and on the water. Nothing is coming.  
  
He wonders at the extent of his love for Theseus, a son that he barely had in every sense of the word. He cannot even be sure the boy is of his blood line – although he is humble enough to admit that he should be honoured to be considered the father of Poseidon's son, as the case may be. He saw nothing of Theseus' early life, missed all of the mundane, yet otherworldly first steps an infant takes – his first words, the first time he understands his words, the first time he sees the sea, when he feels a god's hand on his shoulder for the first time. Yet he saw something of himself in the strong lines of Theseus' jaw, his brow; a determination that he knows so intimately because it is his own. He cannot know if Theseus gets that from him of from another source, located even more closely to his heart than the nature of his father, but it does not matter: he felt a kinship to the young man that stood before him at sixteen that was unsettling and from the first moment set his admiration, and also his fear of the boy on edge.   
  
Theseus is a son he barely had yet he would give anything for that line, that sea-line that you can never see, Poseidon maybe (because if not him, then who? who? on that misty edge that separates air from ocean, who?) to yield to his prayers and to bear his child back to him on willing waves. He is getting old. He can tell, more from how his daughters look at him than from his own body, but he can tell. Staring at the sea tires him more than it used to. His dreams are haunted, not only by water, but by earth as well these past months – the soil of his fathers that he has never feared coming up to devour him before his time. It is not that he does not desire to return to it – he does – he just cannot do it now. Not without an heir and not without having laid eyes on his son's face. He scans the horizons, heart ever heavier. More and more, he falls asleep while sitting on the cliffs. The horizon, that un-negotiable frontier, becomes a beacon of diffuse light on the inside of his eyelids. When he wakes up, nothing has changed but him.  
  
Sometimes he dreams of Theseus in the water, dead, his eyes are open and he sees beyond the line where the world ends. In these dreams he often pulls Aigeus down as well and even amid the fear Aigeus can tell that he is catching glimpses of something beyond this world. In his increasing old-man fevers he talks of curses, wine and curses, his daughters tell him when he is healed again. He does not remember but feels the tug of the horizon.  
  
It is not him, in the end, who spots the sail. He has his eyes closed when they come, taking a moment of relief from the eye-watering game of the sea.  
  
It is not a word from his servant, but a small gasp – and he knows, he knows what must be there. He is to his feet before he has seen what it is.  
  
And this time, it not the sun, winking, white – it is a ship, having crossed that boundary and now restored to them, but bearing not his child. Bearing nothing but a sail that is like a grave in the clear colour of sea-sky. Black. Black. His eyes are open but he sees the diffuse line of light and how it is broken, broken by that sail with the colour of night.  
  
And day does indeed cease to be. He does not even know what he is doing, he is stepping closer – to see, although he sees already. He feels Theseus pulling him down towards where the sky falls down into the water. Wind rushes past him. And he knows, he knows now, where the world ends.


End file.
